<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML ><HEAD ><TITLE >MP3</TITLE ><META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Modular DocBook HTML Stylesheet Version 1.7"><LINK REL="HOME" TITLE="Fedora Multimedia Installation HOWTO" HREF="index.html"><LINK REL="PREVIOUS" TITLE="gstreamer and ffmpeg support" HREF="x157.html"><LINK REL="NEXT" TITLE="Java" HREF="x175.html"></HEAD ><BODY CLASS="sect1" BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#000000" LINK="#0000FF" VLINK="#840084" ALINK="#0000FF" ><DIV CLASS="NAVHEADER" ><TABLE SUMMARY="Header navigation table" WIDTH="100%" BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="0" CELLSPACING="0" ><TR ><TH COLSPAN="3" ALIGN="center" >Fedora Multimedia Installation HOWTO</TH ></TR ><TR ><TD WIDTH="10%" ALIGN="left" VALIGN="bottom" ><A HREF="x157.html" ACCESSKEY="P" >Prev</A ></TD ><TD WIDTH="80%" ALIGN="center" VALIGN="bottom" ></TD ><TD WIDTH="10%" ALIGN="right" VALIGN="bottom" ><A HREF="x175.html" ACCESSKEY="N" >Next</A ></TD ></TR ></TABLE ><HR ALIGN="LEFT" WIDTH="100%"></DIV ><DIV CLASS="sect1" ><H1 CLASS="sect1" ><A NAME="AEN165" ></A >6. MP3</H1 ><P >Fedora won't ship MP3-capable software because the Fraunhofer Institute's patent license terms are not compatible with the GPL.</P ><P >The default music player in FC5 is Rhythmbox. I struggled with Rhythmbox for several hours, but despite its pretty face I found it unusable. It ignores track numbers — or, at least, is not as smart at parsing them out of filenames as xmms is, and doesn't document its import rules anywhere. Trying to beat it into playing MP3s is a nightmare so scarifying that at one point I thought I was going to have to reinstall my entire Linux system just to get the ability to play Oggs back, because I couldn't figure out what piece of undocumented application state had gotten scrambled or how to clear it. The documentation is in general a bad joke — glossy, superficial, and with no useful content about troubleshooting problems. The xmms player may not be as featureful or as nice-looking, but it works better.</P ><P >To install xmms and make it MP3-capable, start by doing this:</P ><TABLE BORDER="0" BGCOLOR="#E0E0E0" WIDTH="100%" ><TR ><TD ><FONT COLOR="#000000" ><PRE CLASS="programlisting" > yum install xmms xmms-mp3 </PRE ></FONT ></TD ></TR ></TABLE ><P >To actually enable MP3 playing, you'll need to run xmms and change its configuration. Select Options → Preferences → Audio I/O Plugins from the menu; this will pop up a window listing plugins. Select "MPEG Layer 1/2/3 Placeholder Plugin" and uncheck [ ] Enable Plugin. With this placeholder gone, xmms will plug in xmms-mp3 automatically. Kill xmms and restart.</P ><P >On my x86_64 box I encountered the problem that xmms would only play sound as root, exiting immediately when run from a non-root account. There are a number of mundane causes for this; check the permissions on your sound devices. There is one <A HREF="http://lists.xmms.org/pipermail/xmms-devel/2000-January/001083.html" TARGET="_top" >exotic problem</A > which I tripped over; you may have to tell your sound module to grab low-memory DMA buffers and not let go of them.</P ><P >To enable MP3 streaming through Firefox or Mozilla, install the gstreamer-ugly plugin and ffmpeg as described below. MP3 streams will play through xmms, podcasts through Totem.</P ></DIV ><DIV CLASS="NAVFOOTER" ><HR ALIGN="LEFT" WIDTH="100%"><TABLE SUMMARY="Footer navigation table" WIDTH="100%" BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="0" CELLSPACING="0" ><TR ><TD WIDTH="33%" ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" ><A HREF="x157.html" ACCESSKEY="P" >Prev</A ></TD ><TD WIDTH="34%" ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" ><A HREF="index.html" ACCESSKEY="H" >Home</A ></TD ><TD WIDTH="33%" ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" ><A HREF="x175.html" ACCESSKEY="N" >Next</A ></TD ></TR ><TR ><TD WIDTH="33%" ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" >gstreamer and ffmpeg support</TD ><TD WIDTH="34%" ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" > </TD ><TD WIDTH="33%" ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" >Java</TD ></TR ></TABLE ></DIV ></BODY ></HTML >